What is Raw Input Buffer in Valorant and how does it affect gameplay?

In competitive games like Valorant performance plays a crucial part in determining who gets an upper hand in a gunfight and as eventually wins the battle overall.

Valorant developers work hard to give players a fair and square environment as well as enable them to make the most of their equipment. They do this by making any necessary changes to the game, be it by way of balancing or performance improvement.

To bring about all of these changes, patch updates are deployed to Valorant in order for these modifications to take effect and improve the game over time.

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Raw Input Buffer beta added to Valorant

For the majority of FPS players, having raw information is preferable to having filtered input from Windows that causes delays. Raw Input can be explained as the input directly taken from the mouse rather than going through Windows’ filter in order to provide better reaction time to the players.

In the 3.07 patch pushed to Valorant, Riot Games mentions a new setting called “Raw Input Buffer” to help with game performance improvement. According to Riot Games, the new beta setting will be using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of input devices to process the input information from them.

Raw Input has been a part of Valorant since the day of its release. The new Raw Input Buffer is being added to adjust APIs with the aim of providing a minor improvement to standard input devices.

However, this patch is mostly targeted towards gaming mice that have the potential of reaching 8000Hz polling rates, which used to be unsupported prior to this update. Gaming mice such as the Razer Viper 8KHz would benefit from this update as Valorant would be able to register information from the mouse faster.

The Raw Input Buffer, in simple terms, improves mouse performance overall. However, users of mice with higher polling rates will notice a significant improvement, while those using standard mice won't benefit quite as much.

However, using Raw Input does come with its own disadvantages. If a player’s frames-per-second (FPS) is low, it lags the mouse movement in the game by a lot.

Regardless, it's another way to improve the user experience in a highly competitive game like Valorant and help make the most of the tools available to the players.